What will Facebook do with $9 billion?

Facebook has finally filed to raise $5 billion through a public offering. But it hardly needs the cash: The company already has almost $4 billion stashed in its piggy bank.
In its IPO filing, Facebook gave standard (boring) boilerplate explanation of what it'll do with the cash it raises: "working capital and other general corporate purposes."

 

Nearly $9 billion is a lot of working capital. Facebook could use it to beef up four key areas.

Ramp up mobile. Facebook's filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission warned potential investors several times about its weakness in mobile.

"We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven," the company wrote.

Facebook wasn't built with mobile in mind -- it was created in 2004, after all -- and it's been slow to develop device-optimized apps. Facebook for iPad, Apple's (AAPL, Fortune 500) tablet, wasn't launched until October. That was 18 months after the iPad launched, and Facebook's delay gave third-party apps a chance to jump in.

The biggest opportunity in mobile: advertising. The company doesn't yet serve ads to users who access Facebook through apps or its mobile site.


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